Rebekah Brooks and six others to learn if charged over phone hacking

Rebekah Brooks will find out tomorrow whether she is to be charged over the
alleged destruction of evidence relating to phone-hacking.

Rebekah Brooks

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

5:47PM BST 14 May 2012

Alison Levitt QC, principal legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, will announce at 10am whether the former News International chief executive and six others are to be charged with perverting the course of justice.

Last month a file on the seven, who also include Mrs Brooks’s husband Charlie, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service by the Metropolitan Police team investigating phone-hacking.

Mr and Mrs Brooks were arrested in March as part of Operation Sacha, an investigation into alleged attempts to destroy material relating to Scotland Yard’s inquiries into phone-hacking, computer hacking and corrupt payments to public officials.

The arrests followed reports that News International instigated an “email deletion policy” as victims of phone-hacking began suing its subsidiary, News Group Newspapers, publisher of the News of the World.

Last year police examined a computer, paperwork and a mobile phone found in a bag in a bin near the Brooks’s London home the day after Mrs Brooks had been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and of corrupting police officers.